10 Years of Scala

Looking back I am stunned how we could have taken an experimental research language and turned it into a tool for everyday programming that’s used by hundreds of thousands of developers. This is even more surprising in that no big company or organization backed Scala. Instead it was a grassroots movement with many super smart and motivated contributors. They are far too numerous to be all listed here, but I nevertheless want to thank some of the contributors by name who influenced the trajectory of Scala in a crucial way. In particular, there were:

Early users who told the world about it: John Pretty, Miles Sabin, David Pollak, Dick Wall, Bill Venners, David McIver, Josh Suereth, Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang, James Iry, Daniel Sobral and many others.

Phil Bagwell, who designed our core collection structures, and was a great spokesperson for the community.

The people writing great open-source libraries using Scala and contributing them back to the public.

Drawing up this list, I am humbled by the amount of hard work people have put in to make Scala what it is. I am sure I have forgotten many others whose contributions were equally crucial. A big thank you to you all!

Now, looking at the next ten years, I believe we have some truly exciting times ahead. I’ll write about some of the opportunities and challenges that I see in another post.